Macrolife (24 page)

Yes, John said silently, looking up into the cold starlight.

And suddenly he was alone again. The voices were still, as if they had forgiven him; he lifted his hands to his face and wept.

He was asleep on the rock, on a patch of soft moss; the warming sun filtered through his eyelids as the noon eclipse ended. The wind was gentle, cooling him just enough for comfort. He opened his eyes, remembering that Anulka was dead and he had come home. The silence was perfect in the apartment he had shared with Margaret. His eyes followed the ceiling as it curved gently down into a wall. Daylight spilled into the room through the one-way window at his right. Lea was far away as he floated in the room's blue hues. The reduced gravity of the bed, the lack of blankets and clothing, seemed strange, but his sleep had been deep and long, giving the kind of rest he had been without for months.

No one had come to see him since his return, and he did not want to see anyone. He stretched and thought of the Humanity II intelligences, who knew everything that had ever been known. He thought of Wheeler, whose link-extended mind roamed through a universe of superconducting patterns. Would life be so much different with a link? Would he be able to pass the tests of health and sanity to be granted a license? How much of humankind's collective wisdom would it take to teach him to live with murder? The pressure of the question forced him to consider alternatives. He had been living only a small part of human life, the life that had been the rule in the past, the life that can be only one thing at a time, that moves outward to grasp all things and fails, craving infinity as it falls back into finitude. The mode of consciousness bestowed by the link was also power over the limits of one's self, Wheeler had once told him; through it a macroworlder was also every human being who had ever recorded a feeling, thought, or discovery. One could never think all the information in the memory bank all at once, but it was available as one desired it, keeping faith with the past. In a sense it was no different from biological memory, which also had to be summoned a piece at a time; and like individual memory, the link formed a perceived background, tacitly altering one's sense of identity. The link made an individual a full citizen, a complete participant; to use the link critically was all of education.
I've been alone for so long, I don't want to be myself any more
. The thought of Lea tightened his stomach. His body moved with the memory of death, twitching as he saw himself breaking the bodies of the horsemen, faceless except for Jerad, all forever dead.

He had thrown his clothes from Lea into the recycler, where nothing was wasted. Hands had stitched the garments together with bone needle and leather thread, hands now still beneath the ground. The clothes had seemed such pitiable things lying on the floor of the bathroom.

He got up from the bed and went to the window. From the first floor, he could see people walking among the trees. The widely spaced columns stood like sentries over the scene, hundred-story pillars holding the levels apart as far as the eye could see. Irregularly shaped daylight screens covered the sky, looking like clouds of bright white light. The blue sky itself, the underside of the next level, seemed very near when he looked at it, but the light screens appeared to be portals into an infinity of white space. All this, he thought, is also the work of human hands, fingers and thumb made powerful by the brain's dreams.

He remembered that he had promised himself that he would never come back to this apartment, that he would never see Margaret again.
Anulka, you might have liked it here. I would have brought you
. He knew that it would have taken her a long time to adjust, to learn, and by then they might not have been together; but he was thinking of how it would have been for her, and her alone, and it would have been better than dying.

Suddenly he remembered his dream. He was with Jerad on the glacier, rolling down toward the edge with his hands around the other's throat. The sky looked as if someone had painted it a shade of blue too dark; the mountains looked too sharp, as if focused through a distorting lens. Jerad's neck was hot in his hands, the blood pulsing desperately into the dirtworlder's head. John squeezed harder as Jerad held him in a hug. Over and over they turned on the hard-pack ice, and still the final swift drop into a crevass did not come.
I wanted to kill him. I would have left him on the glacier to die. I wanted to kill him, but I wanted him to take me with him
. He thought of his boot and Jerad's head.

“Hello.”

John turned around at the sound of Margaret's voice. She was standing in the bedroom doorway with both hands in the pockets of her short coveralls. He struggled against his own reaction, but he was glad to see her.

“You'll have to talk to someone sooner or later,” she said.

“I didn't want to see anyone,” he mumbled lamely, feeling that he would not have the strength to resist her presence.

“Miklos checked the village and took care of the dead. We have a pretty good idea of what happened, Rob, Frank, and myself.”

She came into the room and sat down on the edge of the bed. “The planet hardened your body. You look coarser, older, too lean for a stocky person.”

“I became a murderer down there.”

She was silent for a moment. “It won't settle you to hear me, I know, but please listen.”

He sat down next to her and sighed nervously, feeling himself tremble. She touched the small of his back reassuringly.

“I've been a menace,” he said. He turned and looked at her, noticing that she still wore her hair in a bundle at the back. “I—I caused everything that happened down there—the bad feelings between Jerad and the village, the raid.”

“Listen,” she said. “The raiders destroyed the village, not you. How else could you have judged them except in their own way?”

“But I went down there to help, don't you see?”

“The raiders might have died in the winter except for the stolen food.”

“But they didn't have to kill so much.”

“The village would have starved without its food stores.”

“I didn't have to kill so many.”

“You were angry, unprepared. You're not responsible for the killing they did, only for your own, and that only in part. Why do you think you went to Lea?”

John shrugged. “I don't think I know anymore. I wanted it very much—to see something different, I guess.”

“You felt it was important, and later you wanted to help change what you saw. A similar historical experience motivated the founders of macrolife. Many of us have agonized about earth's scattered colonies. We know they're isolated and backward. Humankind is a collection of fragments right now—those who are planetbound because they have no choice and maybe a dozen macroworlds like us.”

“I know all that. What's your point?”

“Simply this: We're following our own path and maybe we're not wise enough or powerful enough to help.”

“And we tend to discount the possibility of a successful civilization existing on a planet—that's really what is behind our reluctance to help.”

“That's true. We haven't seen much to change our minds. That's the way cultures seem to grow. Earlier social forms are—well, earlier. A child is not an adult. A collection of dust in space will not necessarily become a star.”

“But all we've seen is the overspill from a ruined solar system,” John said. “What about alien cultures? Maybe others have done well with planets.”

“Possibly, but only by turning their world into a garden through a return from space-based industry. Even so, they would have to limit their world's population, while off world population would be growing without check, because it could do so without much trouble.”

“You're assuming that any advancing culture will develop macroforms.”

“It's not the terrible thing you seem to feel it is. Planets are geothermal bombs, plates of mud and rock floating on a molten core—all of it left over from objects that were not big enough to become stars. The surfaces are dangerous beyond anything you have seen, killing a myriad intelligent beings across the course of historical time. Resources are scarce, the level of industrialization limited by the capacity of the planet to absorb heat. Ecobiological concerns slow the pace of technical evolution, effectively preventing the emergence of an efficient technology and economics that would exist to serve humane aspirations. A culture moves off its planet in order to take chains off the human spirit.”

John shrugged again. “How can I argue with any of this? I don't think I ever did, yet all that seems good is forever fleeing from my grasp.”

“You went to Lea to learn. You wouldn't have had to go if you knew what you would find.”

He knew everything she would say. You have to risk being wrong to have a chance at being right. We grow by taking positions for keeps and acting on them until we succeed or fail. It's a well-known theorem that error is more valuable than success, because error teaches you something new, while success teaches you only to repeat it. Success is a rut, error an exploration into the unknown. Humanity II practices this method systematically; but human minds are better at it, since they produce the most fruitful errors and are more creative as a result….

“I'm a murderer, don't you see?”

“What happened was not premeditated killing, but more like warfare.”

“What will happen to me?”

“We have no legal agreements with Lea—there is no government there.”

“That's a real help.”

Margaret sighed. He almost cringed at her show of impatience. “I know you don't like my being explicit because it does little for your feelings, but it's important to offer your feelings a strong alternative. Look—murder is generally wrong, but a general injunction against murder, or killing, has no force or meaning unless it can be applied in a variety of differing, even exclusive circumstances. Killing for profit is murder. Killing in self-defense is not murder. It's a strict application of the rule against murder, because not to defend yourself would mean that you acquiesce in your own murder. Your own life comes before the attacker's, since he initiated the situation and is responsible for it. Therefore, if you kill him you are
obeying
the rule against killing, because you are preventing your own murder and possibly the murder of others. The death of your attacker is incidental and entirely his fault.”

“What about suicide?”

“Suicide is entirely your own business, even if you get someone else to do it for you. Defense during an invasion is also not murder. The attackers are responsible for their own deaths.”

“And what of punishment?”

“We would never execute an imprisoned criminal. You know that. Your pursuit of the raiders came about as the result of their destruction of the village, which you could not control. Make no mistake, they were responsible for your rage, which was justified. Think of other villages you might have saved by your killings.”

“But Jerad would not have encouraged them.”

“They might have come anyway, as they had in the past. And Jerad is responsible for his own choices, not you.”

John felt the tears behind his eyes. “But I didn't have to kill so many—they had no chance against me.” Margaret's analysis seemed too easy.

“You used the tools at your disposal, the flitter. But all this is hindsight. Did you think at the time, or did you simply do it?”

“I wanted to do it after I saw Anulka die.”

“You simply reacted.” She sat closer to him and put her arm around his bare shoulders. “You were defending the one you loved, on a world where there is no law. Your outrage and punishment of the guilty was probably the only lawlike action against the raiders in centuries.”

“I might have just knocked them off their horses…. I forgot the horses.”

“What would you have done with the killers? They're too short lived to change.”

“Jerad might have understood. Now he's dead forever.”

“The thing to do is to recognize that the situation was very bad from the start and go on from that.”

He turned and looked into Margaret's eyes. “Thanks for trying to help, but it's no good right now, no good at all. The thought of living with this, especially when I can't get rid of it, scares me. I feel dirty and can't get clean.”

“The memory could be removed, but whatever would be left would be false, unless we took it all. You might think Anulka still lived. Memories are related and you would become curious about the blanks.”

I might have saved a few of the children
, he thought,
if I had taken them away earlier
.

“No,” he said.

“You see, you do value what has happened.”

“I don't have the right to forget.”

“Exactly what the value of it is for you will become clearer in time. I can't make you accept all I've said, but I think you will find your way to it.”

“I disliked you, Margaret.”

“I know, and I don't blame you.”

“That makes me feel worse.”

She leaned over and kissed him. “Maybe I can try a little harder. Welcome home.”

But as he looked at Margaret and tried to hold himself together, the thought of Anulka filled him again. Blakfar's dying pulse beat was once more in his hand. His mouth was dry. He could not see the end of living with what had happened.

 

“Come in, come in,” Blackfriar said. Tomas Blakfar's tones rose up out of memory as John walked into the office and sat down in front of the old teak desk. The official setting reminded him again that he passed in and out of Frank's awareness with hundreds of other matters.

“We're leaving this system. We've been in motion since this morning.”

“No,” John said, startled inwardly.

“We're going to see what happened to the solar system. Our new mobile is coming with us, at least that far. Later they'll decide to do as they please.” Blackfriar leaned back in his chair and scratched the unchanging black stubble on his scalp. “What are you going to do?” Blackfriar always managed to sound genuinely interested.